Yale to Pilot Automated Pandemic Reporting to CDC
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) surveillance system and Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS) and the Yale Center for Medical Informatics are collaborating on a project to demonstrate implementation readiness for end-to-end automation of hospital pandemic reporting.
NHSN was established in 2005 and today more than 37,000 U.S. healthcare facilities send data to NHSN to support their efforts to track and reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). NHSN said its data supports over $350 million in saving by CMS each year.
The NHSN-YNHHS/Yale project will evaluate a standards-based approach for automating demographic and clinical data collection and reporting. These data are needed for analysis and action during the pandemic, and the analytic needs include measuring healthcare outcomes for patient groups defined by demographic or clinical characteristics.
The project is launching with a proof of concept in April and will move to a full production-level pilot relying on FHIR API and the ONC's US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI). The project will support the beta testing and production readiness of NHSNLink , an Open-Source Reference Implementation for NHSN Reporting. The app, which can be cloud-based or deployed on-premises, uses the FHIR standard to aggregate data from clinical systems, evaluate a clinical quality measure, and share the supporting line-level clinical data for the population matching NHSN surveillance requirements.
NHSN said the project with Yale signals its commitment to minimizing the burden on submitting facilities without compromising on data quality. "The goal is to provide a generalizable solution to data automation that reduces data collection and reporting burden on hospitals while providing timely and accurate data for analysis and response," said Daniel Pollock, M.D., surveillance branch chief, CDC Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, in a statement.
The proof of concept is anticipated to last approximately two months, and with appropriate IRB and security review, will move to a production-level pilot by the summer.
